The war with Russia justified the first part of his creed, and even Liberals in the House of Commons seemed tacitly to agree with the second.

To the glorification of mere money-making, the worship of the golden calf, the sincerest and the most fashionable of all worships, both he and Carlyle were equally opposed.

They were agreed with the Socialists and with Ruskin in their dislike of seeing bricks and mortar substituted for green fields, smoky chimneys for church towers, myriads of factory hands for the rural population of England.
Carlyle still called himself a Radical, a believer in root and branch change, but moral rather than political.

His faith in representative institutions had been shaken by reflecting that the Long Parliament, the best ever assembled in England, would have given up the cause of the Civil War if it had not been for Cromwell and the army.

Although he had been one of Peel's warmest supporters in 1846, he had come to dread Liberalism as tending towards anarchy, and he adopted the singular verbal fallacy that a low franchise would mean a low standard of politics.